Hotmail Begins to Upgrade Free Accounts

Myrmi writes "It looks as if Hotmail have started to upgrade free Hotmail accounts to 250Mb of space as promised. The account the screenshot is from is an old account - created August 1999 - so I guess they're upgrading the accounts in chronological order. Hopefully they'll get round to newer ones soon."

Comments

My Biggest Problem

[Klar]

Sure space is a big issue with the 2mb hotmail accounts, but I think my biggest problem with their service is speed. Even on a broadband connection, the pages usually load very very slowly. This was the main reason that I switched to gmail--it just loads faster. And to top it off, gmail offers 4*250mb plus features like conversations and a good quick spell checker. For me to switch back now, it will take a lot of *new* features on hotmail's service.

Re:My Biggest Problem

[shadowmas]

i still use my hotmail account as the primary account even though i have a gmail because i can download it to my local machine for backup. yes i know hotmail is using a proprietery HTTPMail protocol but its quite simple and i have a simple perl script which download and backup hotmail emails to my local disk via a cron job. until gmail gives me similar facility i dont want to use gmail as my primary account because i want to be able to back them up easily.

Re:My Biggest Problem

[dreadfire]

I agree. MS believes that making the email look pretty and having useless things everywhere is the way to do it. Well if you want pure power and a simpler look go with GMail. Gmail is one of the best email services I have used. I don't even use my POP account anymore because GMail is even better than outlook on many levels.

Re:My Biggest Problem

[bonhomme_de_neige]

The only comment I would make on the Gmail account is that it's hard to list the size of emails and attachments.

Fair call - why not report it as a bug? I've reported a few things that since got fixed or at least added to the to-do list, so they really do listen ;p

Re:My Biggest Problem

[WIAKywbfatw]

Why is it that CSS is held up to higher standards that OSS?

So what that the service isn't as fast as it could be all the time? It's still in beta! In fact, if you speak to any of the development team, as I have done personally, they'll tell you that it isn't technically in beta now (I forget the exact term the Gmail developer used to describe the current state of the service), so it's not entirely surprising that it doesn't work as fast as lightning right now 100 percent of the time.

Believe me, there's still a lot more of work to be done before Gmail is ready for public launch, including support for browsers that aren't currently supported (eg, Opera) and drafting to name but two. Expecting the code to be optimised for speed before the final feature set is tied down is asking a bit much, don't you think?

Besides, isn't it standard practice to cut pre-release software some slack? I've lost track of the number of times I've seen someone justify the presence of bugs in FireFox or any other OSS product as being natural because "it's still in beta", so why not give Google the same breaks too?

Re:My Biggest Problem

[noai]

How many users worked on Hotmail? And how many users worked on GMail?

Re:My Biggest Problem

[mjuarez]

Right now, I label all the large emails I receive with a 'big' tag so that I can easily find them later.

That's a very nice idea. I think I'll go and do that myself.

I would also like a way to strip email of their attachments. There are many cases in which I want to store the email itself for historical and documentation reasons, since it may contain important information, but the attachments are (almost) always copied to my hard disk first. So I don't really need them clogging up my Gmail.

I've reported it already as a suggestion. I'd also love to see a "sort" button and a "size" column, ala Hotmail. If this thing ever goes public, they will have to implement it!

Frames

[signore pablo]

My biggest pet peave other than space with hotmail is the link system.. it opens new links in a new window but within another frame. It would be nice if there was an option in the settings to turn this "feature" off.

Re:Frames

[Yewbert]

My biggest pet peave other than space with hotmail is the link system.. it opens new links in a new window but within another frame. It would be nice if there was an option in the settings to turn this "feature" off.

YES! Mod parent up! I can't tell you how many times I've had to take a long and circuitous route to get back to a directly linked page that, for example, requires cookies, 'cos it seems as if those framed pages of Hotmail's screw up cookie usage. (Or, maybe, data sent through the URL, or some other kinds of non-basic transactions, I dunno, . . .) One example, since I may not be describing it right: I have a 'wish list' of used CDs on file at Djangos.com. Djangos sends me an email when one arrives in stock, and I hit the link to buy it. When I get around to viewing my shopping cart and trying to pay, if I'm still in that *&$#^%$damn Hotmail-framed window, the transaction will fail every time. Highly annoying.

But, anyway, to get back a little closer to the topic at hand - my oldest Hotmail account (from way before MS bought 'em) got upgraded to 250MB in early August.

Re:Well it is not all about space

[vivekg]

It is not all about space. Hotmail is old service and this email id is known to many of friends. So you need to keep this id for some time. But main problems are:
Slow working
Large Advertisements
No keyboard shortcuts
and so on ....

Bottom line: switch to GMAIL (read as get gmail invitation)

Re:Im glad for one

[shadowmas]

the new hotmail interface is hardly simple. just goto the attachment screen it takes u a while to see that the ok button is above the browse for input box.

also it uses javascript links which mean u cant right click and select open in new tab/window. so u cant let each email load in the a seperate tab while ur reading one of them.

old hotmail interface was much better.

But why hotmail or even spymac?

[SySOvErRiDe]

I stick with gmail because of what googling is good for, searching my messages. I've imported all of my messages from the past four years, and I've only filled up a mere 100mb. I plan to use gmail for a very very long time, and I expect google to last pretty much forever. The searching, hotmail doesn't offer that, and I don't think spymac offers that either. Also the ads, there's no small advertising that gets attached to the bottom of the emails like hotmail does it. And those worries about privacy, I trust google more that microsoft hotmail or some other obscure one like spymac.

Re:Im glad for one

[Lisandro]

Oh, c'mon, he's got a point. I like GMail a lot, but Hotmail it's "good enough" for 99% of users, even more if they boost the mailboxes to 250MB. There's a gazillon users of Hotmail thanks to the tie-in with MSN Messenger. And besides the "cool factor", what's the point of changing mails if Hotmail gives you a comparable mailbox size? (I know, but realistically, it's DAMN hard to fill 250MB of mail, never mind 1GB).

My quirks with Hotmail are others; namely, how it has become downhill since purchased by Microsoft (just compare the old interface) and it being a spam magnet like no other.

Re:Well it is not all about space

[almostmanda]

Let's not forget the monthly "try msn messenger and the msn network and upgrade your account!!!" Microsoft spam that you're unable to block or filter out.

hotmail-gmail forwarding

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get gotmail to download your hotmail mail and forward it to your gmail address... I've been doing that since I got my gmail address.
I also uploaded all the mail I had received from the very beginning... The bad thing is, the emails' date in the gmail list will be the date you sent the mail to gmail, not the mail's date (however when you open the mail you'll see the right date).
However you can set up cron to run gotmail every 5 minutes or so, so that the date difference isn't that much.

Just my 0.05cents..